Sunday, April 22, 2012

Last
week, a federal judge sentenced 29-year-old Boston-area pharmacist
Tarek Mehanna, convicted earlier this year of various material support
for terrorism charges, to 17.5 years in a supermax prison. Mehanna has
been in lockdown for most of the past four years, held in solitary
confinement for 23 hours a day in a cell “the size of a small closet,”
as Mehanna described during his powerful statement to the judge at the hearing.

FBI coercion

Before prosecuting him, the government tried to coerce Mehanna into
becoming an FBI informant and spying on his community, approaching him
after a hospital shift and telling him that he could go the “easy” way
and never see the inside of a prison cell, or Mehanna could choose the
“hard” way. Mehanna chose the hard way, which his lawyer says he is
being punished for. Indeed, defendants’ refusal to become informants is a troubling commonality in a number of terror prosecutions.
And during the trial the prosecution used the tried and true tactic
of invoking the specter of the 11 September 2001 attacks, even though
Mehanna has no connection to those events whatsoever. When the
word “terror” is invoked, even in cases like Mehanna’s where no act of
violence is alleged to have been perpetrated, government prosecutors are
nearly universally able to secure guilty verdicts — so much so that defendants are more likely to take plea deals than have their day in court.

Opposition to US foreign policy

There are noteworthy exceptions to Mehanna’s case. One is that
Mehanna cannot be described as “low-hanging fruit” — vulnerable members
of the community who are easy targets for the FBI’s unscrupulous paid
agents provocateur. In his sentencing statement last week, Mehanna
resolutely asserted his principles. He described a lifelong framework of
understanding the world in terms of the oppressor versus the oppressed,
his opposition to the horrors perpetrated by US forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the right of Muslims to defend themselves from foreign
invaders, whether they be “Soviets, Americans or Martians.” Mehanna
concluded by telling the courtroom, “The government says that I was
obsessed with violence, obsessed with ‘killing Americans.’ But, as a
Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”

“Muslim exception” to First Amendment

In her article, and in the below interview I did with her over the
phone yesterday, Murray contrasts Mehanna’s case with that of Sami
al-Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student in Idaho who was in 2004 acquitted
by a jury of similar terror charges related to his Internet activity.
Murray attributes the different outcomes in verdicts in part to “the
widespread acceptance of the notion of a ‘domestic radicalization
process’ promoted through Internet activity,” first put forward by the
New York Police Department and now the foundation of anti-terror policy
at many levels of government.

In the below interview, edited for length, Nancy Murray explains why
she believes a “Muslim exception” is being carved out of the First
Amendment, how a juror came to Mehanna’s sentencing hearing to ask the
judge for mercy, and why Tarek Mehanna’s case has wide-reaching
implications.Maureen Clare Murphy: How is Tarek Mehanna’s case a
free speech case, and how does it fit into a wider pattern of Muslims’
rights being undermined for the sake of so-called national security?Nancy Murray: I think this case really highlighted
for us here in Boston the way the government has set around
criminalizing expression which it doesn’t like.

When you look at the Tarek Mehanna case, they started zeroing in on
him when he was a teenager, when he was, like many young people, very
overt in his opinions. He was really upset about what was happening, the
threats to go to war in Iraq, everything that was going on in
Afghanistan. So when he was 19, 20 they started throwing everything they
could at him in terms of surveillance, including a sneak-and-peek
search of his parents’ home, intercepting emails, wiretapping his phones
and so on. He apparently had a lot of people who really respected him
because he was a very serious young man, he seemed very fearless, he
would stand up and say what was wrong.

What [government prosecutors] had against him is that he went on a
trip to Yemen in 2004. According to the government, they were trying to
find a training camp, which they didn’t succeed [in finding], he and a
friend. The defense has said that he went there looking for religious
study opportunities, and I can’t judge which of those is true. But on
his return, he never, ever got involved in any plot. What he did was he
translated documents, he downloaded some, he shared them with friends,
and he engaged in chats. There’s never been any evidence presented that
he did any of this in coordination with al-Qaida or any other terrorist
group.

But what the government is saying is that he constituted himself as
the media wing of al-Qaida. That is a big leap, because they have no
evidence. The government never showed that what we call his expressive
activity, [Mehanna’s] rights under the First Amendment, were ever in any
way coordinated with a terrorist group. [Author’s note: The
controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project
drastically expanded the government’s definition of what constitutes
material support of terrorism, including political advocacy if done in a
“coordinated way” with a group on the State Department’s designated
foreign terrorist organization list.] But they skirted around this in
the trial. And what they did during the trial was just use visuals of
9/11, to mention al-Qaida about every other sentence, and to really give
the impression to the jury that he was acting in coordination with
al-Qaida when they didn’t actually present any evidence saying that he
was. So it was inflammatory, and the jury found him guilty of conspiracy
to give material support.

The defense did a very good job trying to bring up the First
Amendment, but they were continually rebuffed by the judge. The judge
not only didn’t allow an ACLU brief to be entered in — in the very
beginning we had written a brief saying that many of these charges
should be dropped because they were protected by the First Amendment.
But the judge refused to have that brief admitted at the beginning. He
said it would be more appropriate for a later court preceding. He then
continually refused to allow First Amendment to enter into the defense,
and he made no mention of it in his instructions to the jury. At the
[sentencing hearing], one of the jurors was present. Before the judge
sentenced Mehanna, the defense attorneys had tried to get the judge to
listen to what this juror had to say. The judge said no, that she could
submit something in writing afterwards, but he wasn’t going to allow her
to speak in that hearing.

People [who had attended the trial] were flabbergasted when the
jurors came out and voted him guilty. But I think they did so just
because the instructions didn’t bring up that this is protected
expression, and the whole inflammatory nature of having 9/11 constantly
invoked. And I must say, it was really grim hearing the prosecution at
the sentencing hearing talk about Mehanna, because they didn’t just say
that he went and looked for a camp and tried to train. What they were
saying was that this was incredibly dangerous what he had done, its
impact will linger, it had done extreme harm, because now this is all
over the Internet, what he translated and so on.

Basically, [government prosecutor Aloke Chakravarty said] that he
deliberately set out to radicalize others and that there’s a lasting
impact which will harm the community for years to come. Clearly, they
were trying to make this a very big deal, that [Mehanna was] a
mastermind who was out there using the Internet to create this huge
legion of radicalized Muslims around the world who will seek to create
violence against the United States. And the fact of the matter is, Tarek
Mehanna went on to get his PhD in pharmacy — he knew he was under
surveillance, the FBI apparently asked him twice to be an informant. The
final time they asked him they said, we’ll do this the easy way or the
hard way. You either go along with us, that’s the easy way, and the hard
way, we’ll see what happens.
And he chose the hard way, whereas his former friends agreed to
testify against him, although some of them testified on the stand that
basically he hadn’t done what the government had said he had done. It’s a
case of the jury really being played on, in my view, by the
prosecution, to basically say that this is really one of the worst
things you can do, recruiting others to the cause, and it’s all done
through the Internet without any demonstrated proof that doing these
translations has made all these radical converts. And for that, the
prosecution asked for 25 years.

There had been a big effort on the part of the defense to try and
present another image of Tarek to both the US attorney and the judge by
having the community and others write letters, talking about what he was
like. That must have had some impact with the judge, who decided to go
with a 17.5-year sentence instead of a 25-year one.

MCM: He’s being sentenced to 17.5 years in a
supermax prison. Can you describe the kind of conditions he will be held
in, and the kind of conditions he has been held in, as I understand he
has been in lockdown for four years now.

NM: The conditions he faces are conditions which are
meant to destroy people. The supermax conditions are not just that
you’re in solitary for 23 hours a day, but that you are under strict SAM
— special administrative measures — which restrict how much contact you
can have with anyone. I believe his parents won’t even be allowed to
have direct contact visits with him, it’ll probably be through glass.
Very infrequent visits, very infrequent telephone calls, very controlled
the amount of pages of letters you are allowed to write, all of this.
It’s really designed to break people. The fact that he managed [to
endure] the solitary confinement in Plymouth County jail is pretty
amazing. The kind of solitary [confinement] of these supermaxes is
clearly inhuman, inhumane, no matter what the European Court says. I
mention that because the European Court basically said British Muslims
can be extradited by the United States because the treatment they get
here will not be cruel and unusual punishment, even if they end up in
solitary confinement supermaxes, which we think is really wrong, because
it’s a form of psychological torture designed to break people down.

And let me just give you a flavor of what the defense had to say
during the sentencing hearing. [Defense attorney] Jay Carney doesn’t
make political speeches, that’s not what he does, but here’s what he had
to say about Tarek. He said, it’s clear from what [US attorney] Mr.
Chakravarty has written and said that the government wants the defendant
to be punished for statements made which are protected by the First
Amendment and for his refusal to become an informant. And he goes on and
on, talking about how not only were all of these statements protected,
but the message the government sent through the Tarek case is that you
will be punished if you don’t become an informant. Then he goes on to
say that the government is breathtaking in its hypocrisy in how it
treated [Kareem] Abuzahra, who is the chief guy who became an informant
and testified against Tarek, because it was Abuzahra who was really
saying we have to bomb a mall, and it was Tarek saying, well no, this is
not what we’re gonna do. We’re here in America, this is our country, we
cannot go to war here in the United States.

What Tarek did say in his amazingly cogent talk that he delivered at
his hearing — which was not read, he didn’t have a single piece of paper
that I could see — he talked about the need of Muslims to be able to
defend [themselves] from foreign invaders, and that was his focus. His
focus was Iraq, his focus was Afghanistan, his focus was being extremely
critical of American foreign policy, not “let’s go kill Americans in
the United States.”

This is what I thought was so interesting, [defense attorney Carney
is] speaking to judge George O’Toole, and tells him he remembers that
when he was a high school student, how much he hated the occupying
British army, what it was doing to northern Ireland, and he thought of
joining the IRA when he was in college. And he said that deliberately to
the judge, just to get him to try to understand the parallels here.
Then he went on and talked about how Tarek’s views moderated over the
decade, and he objected to almost all the views of al-Qaida, with the
exception that Muslims have got to be able to defend themselves in their
own land.

For at least eight years, probably longer, the FBI had [Mehanna]
under scrutiny. And if he was so dangerous, as Carney said, why did it
wait so long to arrest him? They arrested him once in 2008 for making a
false statement, then they allowed him to be released on bail. So
[Carney] said if he was so dangerous, why did they allow him to be
released on bail? But it was after that they tried again to make him an
informant.

It’s just really demoralizing to think that so many years after 9/11,
it is getting easier for the government to bring these prosecutions,
rather than harder, because people have just been so indoctrinated. You
don’t really have to produce evidence to get a conviction, you just have
to play with inflammatory imagery and make assertions that this man is
dangerous. I won’t say all juries, but this particular jury was swayed
by it.

And if you contrast that with the jury in Idaho, and I mention this
in the piece I wrote, the Sami al-Hussayen case, the Saudi graduate
student at the University of Idaho — in that it was the biggest news
because the governor and [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft stated
they had just uncovered this terror cell and the way they did that was
by having a giant military plane come with a swat team of over 150
people who took over the campus at five in the morning and raided the
rooms where foreign students lived, and captured this young Saudi
student who was living with his wife and young children.

And so they get a jury to try the case, and it was a case again about
using the Internet. He had been a webmaster, Sami al-Hussayen, for what
the government considered to be radical groups. And in this case, the
jury said that this was protected First Amendment activity. And the
government relied only on a single witness, a former CIA agent who said
this is not how you make dangerous radicals, by just doing web posting.

So if you contrast what happened in Tarek’s case with that, and if you contrast it with what happened in the Hutaree case in Michigan
— I kept thinking, what if Tarek and his friends had actually
stockpiled weapons and had been talking about particular details about
killing a police officer and bombing his funeral, which is what these
Hutaree militia people had did. [In that case] the judge said this is
protected by the First Amendment, and they were just venting, and the
plot was not sufficiently ripened to say that this was a real plot. I
mean, can you imagine that happening [in Mehanna’s case]? That’s why in
my view, it really is that the First Amendment is having a Muslim
exception carved out of it, not so much for all people who are wanting
to vent against the government.

MCM: Lastly, what do you think is the bottom line
that people should take away from Tarek Mehanna’s case, and why do
people need to pay closer attention to these cases?

NM: We really are now on a slippery slope. If we
care about the First Amendment, if we care about being able to criticize
foreign policy, to criticize what our government is doing, this case is
really relevant. Just like with the Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project,
this case shows that the First Amendment is now just a convenience.
When the government says it can exist, it can exist, when they say no,
forget it, then they can move in and use other language.

It’s so much the kind of guilt by association that we saw during the
McCarthy period in the first red scare and the second red scare. Well,
that is really back. The really low points in our history include red
scares, just like they include Japanese American internment and slavery
and so on. We are now in danger of that kind of scapegoating, having the
fear of the so-called enemy within again, using thought crime, guilt by
association, in ways which we will later really come to regret.

And not only that, but once one group is seen as the dangerous enemy
within, it’s so easy to then say, what about other groups that might be
critical of US policy, [to say] that they must be linked in with this
conspiracy. Everything is so vague, you could just pump it up to be
whatever the government says it is, and that is extremely dangerous.

It’s a pattern that I hope we can really denounce, that we can
courageously stand up against, because I think a lot of people will be
chilled, they won’t want to criticize what the government is doing,
because they do see it could end up putting you in hot water. I think
that if we intend to have a democracy, the First Amendment has to be
part of it. Otherwise, forget it, we will have a pure and simple police
state. It’s up to all of us to care about this and the implications not
just for Muslims, not just for Tarek and his family, but for our
constitutional rights generally and the kind of democracy we say we are.

Break the Chains.info

is a news and discussion forum for supporters of political prisoners, prisoners of war, politicized social prisoners, and victims of police and state intimidation.

This blog is organized and updated autonomously of the disbanded Break the Chains Prisoner Support Network formerly based in Eugene, Oregon. While this online project shares several of the same concerns as the old Break the Chains collective, no formal organization exists behind the current web presence.

"I will never surrender my pride and dignity nor allow the system to 'cut my tongue' and I will always, without fear, speak out against these war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter if I spend the rest of my life in a prison cage, and draw my last breath of air laying down in this steel bed surrounded by razor-wire fences and cages, and its prison policies that are designed to destroy one's humanity…."